19 July 22
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After Russia’s invasion, many post-Soviet immigrants in the U.S. are estranged from or barely speaking with longtime friends back home.
Yet, distance and time seem like quaint obstacles to me now, compared with the pain of being on different sides of the war in Ukraine. I talked with several post-Soviet immigrants in the U.S. who, after Russia’s full-scale invasion, are estranged from or barely speaking with longtime friends.
My family friend Kate, who asked to be identified by only her first name for fear of harassment over her ethnicity and political views, hasn’t spoken with her friend Vera in more than three months. Kate and Vera (not her real name) grew up in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and have been friends since they were 4. It’s been decades since they’ve lived in the same city—Kate now lives in Los Angeles and Vera in St. Petersburg—but the women talked regularly, and Kate is godmother to Vera’s daughter. In Kate’s telling, they argued over Vera’s belief that the visual evidence of Russian atrocities in Ukraine is fake. Kate did not expect her friend to publicly oppose the war and risk a 15-year jail sentence. But recently, a mutual friend had to evacuate Kharkiv, and Kate was dismayed that, as she perceives it, even this didn’t cause Vera to soften her views. Kate suspects that Vera might be more skeptical of Russia’s version of events than she felt safe letting on. But their inability to find common ground over the basic facts of the war has fractured 40 years of friendship and cut off Kate from her goddaughter. “It’s hard. I know that she struggles, and I can’t even send her money,” Kate told me, because money-transfer companies such as Western Union have suspended operations in Russia. Sending money abroad is somewhere between an immigrant love language and a duty.
Losing a close friendship under these circumstances is an ambiguous loss. Ambiguous losses lack closure and can leave those experiencing them in a state of emotional limbo. Kate, having grown up in the former Soviet Union, understands her friend’s actions to be a survival skill. Still, the closure-less question of what a friend truly believes, and to what degree they should be held accountable for it in the context of this war, haunted the people I spoke with.
For immigrants who still have relatives in Ukraine, an additional calculation must be made: Stay silent or risk imperiling not only a friendship but also your family’s safety. Alona Ford grew up in Ukraine and moved to Arkansas in her 20s. When, in the early days of the war, a childhood friend living in Moscow posted an Instagram photo of herself flipping off the camera with the pro-war Z symbol stitched on her sleeve, captioned, “We’re going to win,” Alona felt terrible. The two spent summers together at their families’ dachas in Ukraine and kept in touch through social media. “She’s a very educated person. I wanted to message her,” Alona told me. She quietly unfollowed her instead. “All of these Russians, even my friends, know where my people live,” she explained.
If this sounds paranoid to you, you probably aren’t from the former Soviet Union, where civilian informers were essential collaborators in state-sanctioned violence. Human-rights groups attest that the Russian government and police force continue to violently punish civilians who publicly criticize the Kremlin. In that light, confronting a friend over their views of the war could feel like a selfish choice rather than a noble one. For Alona, there was little honor in vigorously defending Ukraine’s right to self-determination from the safety of her home in the U.S. if it meant putting her loved ones at risk.
Another friend of Alona’s, Liza (not her real name), grew up with her in Kherson, Ukraine. They’ve been friends for more than 20 years, and Alona is close with Liza’s son. As Alona recalled, they mostly kept in touch through a group chat with two other Ukrainian women. When the invasion began, Liza refused to talk politics in the chat, and she stopped responding altogether after Alona and the other women said that ordinary Russians should be doing more to oppose the war. Alona believes it may be better for them not to speak for the time being, both to avoid putting Liza at risk and in case Liza “says something bad to us.” She hopes that their friendship will return to normal but suspects it will never be the same. “But it will definitely not change my relationship with her son,” she told me. “It’s not his fault—he is a child.”
Given that this war seems unlikely to reach a swift resolution anytime soon, the question of how long these estrangements will last—and in what form these friendships may return—weighed on the immigrants I spoke with. I was struck by how empathic so many were in explaining that their friends in Russia are victims of an oppressive regime, that they are suffering under international sanctions, that resisting the nonstop drip of state-run misinformation is easier said than done. To some, behavior including unexplained radio silence after decades of friendship and open support of the war was forgivable. One person speculated that because their pro-Russian friend belongs to a marginalized group that has faced intense discrimination in Moscow, outspoken patriotism may be a form of self-protection.
The most intimate saga I’ve watched play out in real time has been among my father’s classmates, most of whom went to elementary through high school together in Moldova and are now scattered across Ukraine, Russia, Israel, and elsewhere in Europe. For years, he has belonged to an active WhatsApp group with more than a dozen other classmates, who frequently share stories, family photos, and jokes. After the war escalated in February, those in Ukraine began posting harrowing updates (“They started bombing at 5:50. We’re drinking our morning coffee. Watching the sky.”). Their messages were largely met with silence from their Russian classmates. Then, in March, a Russian classmate vaguely referenced “the situation,” and a Ukrainian classmate responded, “This isn’t a situation. It’s a shameful war.” Several Ukrainians quietly left the group over what, in my father’s interpretation, was a perceived lack of concern for their families’ safety. Since the Ukrainians’ exit, some Russian members have implored the group to place a moratorium on discussing politics. They say they don’t want to abandon four decades of friendship over differing opinions on the war. The fraught arguments continued even as friends on opposing sides reiterated their love for one another.
My father—who was born in Ukraine, went to school in Moldova, and now lives in Los Angeles—has been a passive observer to all of this, preferring to correspond privately with the member of the group he is closest with. He’s disappointed with his classmates’ support of the war and relieved that things came to a head in the chat. “The fake cheeriness was intolerable,” he told me. He’s been checking on his Ukrainian classmates regularly and has become closer friends with one. Sometimes he tears up sharing her updates, like when she sent him a photo of her baby-faced 20-year-old nephew dressed in army fatigues, cradling a rifle. A couple of years after graduating high school, he is serving in the Ukrainian army, as is his father. Seeing this photo after spending several hours reading my father’s Russian classmates’ pro-war messages left me feeling dejected. “Their opinions aren’t the ones that matter,” my father told me. This was an assertion I’d heard several times by then—that any individual civilian’s support or opposition to the war would not meaningfully affect its outcome.
When I asked the post-Soviet immigrants I spoke with how these conflicts with friends have made them feel, I was often met with a similar sentiment: The strain on their friendships is heavy but pales in comparison with what the war has taken from so many. They hesitated to center their experience of the war from a position of safety. But it is clear that the war has wrought astonishing pain across multiple axes for those living in the diaspora. They spend their days waiting for proof of life from their loved ones and their nights glued to Ukrainian news broadcasts. They watch as their childhood apartments, their schools, the hospitals where they were born, the cemeteries where their grandparents are buried are destroyed. Some are also navigating clashes with family members who support the war.
After several of my father’s Ukrainian classmates left the group chat, one of his Russian classmates wrote, “This is our shared tragedy … We each have our right to our own view of the situation. It’s better to be silent than to fight.” If, like me, you read two months’ worth of WhatsApp messages with this tenor, you might wonder why, given their intensely personal stake in the welfare of the Ukrainian people, so many of the immigrants I spoke with expressed a desire to maintain intimate friendships with those who support the war. How can they stomach that their friends may view the death and displacement of Ukrainian civilians—including people they know and love—as collateral damage? For some, once the initial shock wore off, a creeping sense of inevitability set in. That their friends might be ambivalent, apathetic, or staunchly in support of the war was a foregone conclusion informed by their belief that the minds of those living in Russia are not free. The people I spoke with judge these friends, but they also pity them. Having survived the state-sanctioned violence and repression of the former Soviet Union, many people I talked with know what it’s like to live in fear, cut off from the rest of the world.
Which friendships are worth fighting for is always a personal decision. But some of the many tragic and alienating effects of war are these kind of schisms among lifelong friends who had managed to remain close against the odds. Ultimately, even the friends who want to stay connected will have to grapple with this question: How do you move forward when you cannot agree upon the same reality?
A woman uses her phone. (photo: Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: New Documents Reveal 'Huge' Scale of US Government's
Cell Phone Location Data Tracking
Documents obtained by the ACLU suggest the federal agency has contracts with private companies to see people’s location based on cell phone records. Very cool and normal
Per the documents, hundreds of thousands of location points across North America have been attained by DHS. Purchasing the information from private businesses would help circumvent legal requirements to obtain a warrant.
The documents were obtained by the ACLU as part of a lawsuit filed in 2020 demanding “DHS, CBP, and ICE to release information about their purchase and use of precise cell phone location information.”
Per the documents, law enforcement agencies have secured contracts with data harvesting companies like Venntel and Babel Street. These firms gather user location data through common apps installed on mobile phones.
The documents span from 2017 to 2019, and indicate that more than 336,000 location data points were available to law enforcement. There are concerns that the information revealed the filing is only a small portion of DHS and CPB’s use of the data, when Venntel pitched federal agencies on their product, they highlighted their data collection pool included 250 million mobile devices and could secure upwards of 15 billion location data points a day. While identifying user data should theoretically be unavailable to law enforcement, a review of the documents by Politico identified an exchange in which a representative from Venntel reassured ICE that “there are derived means by which identifiers and pertinent location can be assembled.”
Shreya Tewari — Brennan fellow for the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project — told Politico that users granting location permissions to applications on their phones are “not expecting that that’s going to be potentially creating this massive database of their entire location history that’s available to the government at any time.”
“The Supreme Court has made clear that because our cell phone location history reveals so many ‘privacies of life,’ it is deserving of full Fourth Amendment protection,” the ACLU said via a statement from ACLU deputy director Nathan Freed Wessler.
A separate report from Vice found that Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) has used data gathered by Venntel and Babel Street to aid investigations by state and local law enforcement agencies. The documents also reveal that HSI has provided information to local field offices, including Knoxville, New York, Detroit, El Paso, Houston, Miami, Phoenix, Seattle, San Antonio, and Washington D.C.
HSI officials have communicated with each other regarding finding addresses using Venntel data points, one HSI official wrote that the Venntel licenses should be used only in criminal investigations and are not intended for use as an immigration enforcement tool. According to the internal communications revealed in the documents, the tools do not provide law enforcement with the identity of individuals whose data is reviewed, and a subpoena is still needed to access that information.
While the documents explore law enforcement’s use of the harvested data under the Trump administration, the practice is expected to continue. Despite a June 2019 order from DHS’s acting privacy officer to ““stop all projects involving Venntel data,” both Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement signed new contracts with Venntel through 2023.
The New York City subway. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
19 july 22
The ruling was an escalation of the Court’s 2008 Heller decision that reset precedent by overlooking the first 13 words of a 27-word amendment — specifically the language about a “well regulated Militia” — and ruled that there is indeed an individual right to own and carry a gun. At a moment when mass shootings are nightmarishly commonplace, Bruen feels aggressively wrongheaded. But even if you believe (as the conservative justices say they do) that they are simply reading the Constitution closely, they have lifted the Second Amendment above the First, which explicitly sets down the “right of the people peaceably to assemble.” Those rights that have long defined this country — freedom of speech, religion, the press — are being eclipsed by another right, one that’s become an article of faith for many Americans. Our idealistic First Amendment country is being turned into a deeply cynical Second Amendment country.
Last September, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the American Civil Liberties Union jointly filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in support of New York’s long-standing approach to handgun limits. “This is a case about the Second Amendment,” says the brief’s summary, “but its resolution also implicates fundamental First Amendment values.” The brief goes on to argue that “self-government depends on the ability of the people to participate fully in civic, political, and economic life. People need to feel safe to vote, to go to school and work, to walk the streets, and to assemble, associate, and speak freely in public.” As one of the brief’s authors, NYCLU supervising attorney Perry Grossman, recently told me, “You need breathing space in the public sphere for civic life to occur.”
The ruling, as written by Justice Clarence Thomas, eliminates that breathing space. It advances a perception of the United States as a dystopian nation where day-to-day survival depends on being armed. Justice Samuel Alito’s concurrence to the majority opinion specifically references New York City and its purportedly dark, frightening streets. Sounding like he’s watched too many 1970s Clint Eastwood movies, Alito argues that unless residents “can brandish or, if necessary, use a handgun in the case of attack, they may be murdered, raped or suffer some other serious injury.”
“It’s bullshit. I mean, call it what it is,” asserts the NYCLU’s executive director, Donna Lieberman. “It does not reflect the reality of life in New York, which is what the case is about.”
New York governor Kathy Hochul apparently felt the same way, leading to a substantial bill (41001 in the Assembly and 51001 in the Senate) that creates more stringent (but less subjective) eligibility requirements for carrying a gun. Effective September 1, it also designates a large number of “sensitive locations” where guns are prohibited, including government buildings, houses of worship, libraries, public parks and playgrounds, zoos, and every imaginable kind of school. The subway system and other forms of public transportation are covered, as are airport terminals, bars, casinos, and venues licensed for cannabis consumption. It’s a long list.
As reassuring as it is that the state legislature is coming down on the side of the First Amendment, the idea that we need to delineate gun-free zones underscores the problem but doesn’t solve it. Sure, public streets and sidewalks that have been roped off for an event count as sensitive locations, as does “any gathering of individuals to collectively express their constitutional rights to protest or assemble.” However, public thoroughfares being used for the everyday business of going about our lives do not. Shouldn’t they be? What is more peaceable a form of assembly than the act of walking down a Fifth Avenue sidewalk?
In Lieberman’s reading of the Bruen decision (which she labels a “monumental manipulation of history”), there’s “a lot of room to protect sensitive spaces and activity that makes spaces sensitive.” But only one specific place has been labeled “sensitive” in the bill: Times Square. Yes, it’s New York City’s most iconic public place and tourist destination — 365,000 pass through daily — and it’s jammed most of the time. But it’s also the exact place that many New Yorkers pride themselves on avoiding. It’s not exactly the center of civic life.
State Senator Brad Hoylman, whose Manhattan district includes Times Square, says that he “personally led the fight to include it in the bill.” The reasons are the obvious ones, that it’s a “heavily touristed and trafficked pedestrian plaza where there are many public protests and demonstrations and assemblies of people.” The real reason Times Square needs its own designation is less obvious: It doesn’t fall under any of the other gun-free categories. It’s not a park or a public place in any normal, regulatory sense. It’s merely a confluence of streets, some of which have been closed to traffic and transformed into plazas. But so many gathering places in New York City defy categorization. What about the crowded walkways on the East River bridges or the myriad other locations where, as in Times Square, streets have been transformed into public plazas?
Hoylman says that the designation of other spots — including the World Trade Center and the entire borough of Manhattan — was debated, but nothing else made the cut. The legislators, he says, were trying their best to craft a bill with an eye toward “anticipating what a court challenge to the law might be.”
No doubt there will be many of those challenges. One of the first was filed on July 11 by Buffalo businessman and congressional candidate Carl Paladino, who likened banning guns in a public place to outlawing speaking or praying. (The example Paladino cited in interviews was McDonald’s, which doesn’t appear to fall into any of the “sensitive” categories listed in the bill. Never mind that private businesses are still allowed to ban firearms as they wish. For now, at least.)
Hoylman notes that some Republican lawmakers in Albany argued that a gun-free designation will somehow make Times Square a magnet for armed criminals. This doesn’t seem to be a concern for the Times Square Alliance, whose president, Tom Harris, calls it “fitting that Times Square, with its high volume of pedestrian traffic, be deemed a sensitive location worthy of additional scrutiny.”
Although there have been several high-profile shootings in and around Times Square in recent years — such as the one last October that led to the New York Post’s classic headline “MAN SHOOTS HIMSELF IN THE LEG WHILE URINATING IN TIMES SQUARE” — nothing suggests the problem is one that will be solved by arming more people rather than fewer.
Hoylman, for his part, is concerned about what declaring one especially famous piece of New York City a gun-free zone implies about every other part of the city. It suggests that the places where we routinely go about our lives can be left to their own devices. “We’ve had to stake out in statute where people can feel most safe,” he says, “and it’s really turned our notion of public safety on its head.”
The forest near the city of Mbandaka, Democratic Republic of the Congo. (photo: Thomas Nicolon/Reuters)
This land of towering trees is home to forest elephants, bonobos and millions of people; it helps regulate our climate and slows climate change by removing 1.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year.
The government of the Democratic Republic of Congo speculates that up to 16 billion barrels of oil may lie under the rainforest. In addition to accelerating the climate crisis, oil exploration here would be a pollution disaster for communities that depend on it and for wildlife. It could also become a major new source of civil unrest in an already unstable country. Given that the 1998-2003 Congo War and its aftermath killed more people than any conflict since World War II, everything possible should be done to avoid conflict in Congo.
The Congo government is reportedly auctioning exploratory oil drilling rights across an immense area on July 28 and 29. Of the 16 blocks on sale, nine are in the “central basin” rainforest region, covering roughly 59 million acres of land. That’s more land than the states of New York and Maine combined. This is a hastily arranged sale, probably driven by Congo’s coming presidential election and a hope of attracting oil companies with windfall profits driven by the Ukraine war.
Four of the rainforest blocks, by my estimate, include about 2.5 million acres of peat swamp forest. This waterlogged ecosystem was first identified, by a team I led, as the world’s largest tropical peatland in 2017. The peat stores colossal amounts of carbon, equivalent to three years’ worth of the world’s carbon emissions from fossil fuel use.
Commercial hunters find reaching the waterlogged swamps difficult, so these peat swamp forests remain havens for wildlife. But oil prospecting requires the systematic cutting of thousands of miles of corridors to transport seismic survey equipment. If cut, these corridors will open up every part of the forest, with hunters and then illegal loggers following, dooming this natural sanctuary for wildlife.
It is unclear whether there really are substantial oil deposits beneath the Congo rainforest; if there is enough usable oil, it is also unclear whether getting it from such remote environments to global markets is economically viable. Yet, even if the initial survey revealed no commercial-scale oil deposits, the rainforests’ biodiversity value would still be destroyed.
Once accessible and degraded, the rainforests would most likely succumb to rampant deforestation, increasing carbon emissions. In the peatlands, this disturbance would begin the release of carbon from the peat: up to 5.8 billion tons from the oil concession areas.
If oil production turns out to be viable, new dangers will surely follow. Data from drilling in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest gives an indication of what could happen. Bringing oil to the surface produces three barrels of toxic wastewater for every barrel of oil. In the Peruvian Amazon, this is most likely poisoning wildlife and people. In one study, 98.6 percent of children living in an oil production zone exceeded the safe limits for the cancer-causing heavy metal cadmium in their blood.
Oil drilling would be particularly damaging in the peatlands, where everything is connected by water. Oil spills and wastewater from drilling could destroy biodiversity, pollute vast areas and poison the water, fish and other natural resources upon which local people depend.
This is certainly dystopian, but Nigeria’s Niger Delta provides a case study of the wider impacts of drilling for oil in a country with weak governance and high levels of poverty. Here, where Shell and others extract oil and gas under heavily armed guard, oil spills are common. They have left many people, whose livelihoods rely on the land and the water, destitute in a shockingly polluted landscape. (Shell has denied responsibility for any of the spills.) Naturally, there is continuing resistance to this exploitation, including protests, international court cases and armed militants repeatedly sabotaging oil production.
The potential financial payoff for drilling in the Congo rainforest is also becoming increasingly unlikely. The plummeting cost of renewable energy and climate policies to cut the use of fossil fuels are beginning to wean the world off oil. More than one in 10 new cars sold globally in 2021, for example, were electric, double the number sold in 2020. Any oil development in Congo’s rainforest is likely to one day be a “stranded asset.”
The predicament for Congo’s government is obvious. As one of the world’s poorest countries, it needs exports to gain revenue. But opening oil development in the center of the country could create a new region of civil unrest, adding to the long-term armed conflict in the east, potentially destabilizing the whole country.
Is there another way? Yes. Congo has major reserves of extremely valuable metals like cobalt needed for the global energy transition. Well-regulated mining that pays tax can bring the country dependable revenue in the 21st century, without oil.
More broadly, alternative approaches to oil development exist. Congo should map forest-dwellers’ lands and give them rights to those lands, using the community forest model. Then cut off the drivers of deforestation in line with making a prosperous country. Charcoal for cooking is one source of deforestation, and the charcoal is a major health hazard. Moving to cooking on electric stoves, powered by solar energy, solves both problems and is now price competitive.
The international community should also work with Congo to make it lucrative to keep rainforests standing. Payments to local people with land rights in exchange for agreements to keep protecting their forests can fund development without environmental destruction.
Some progress is being made. The Central African Forest Initiative, a donor group that includes France, Germany, Norway and Britain, signed a $500 million agreement with Congo at last year’s COP26 climate talks to protect its forests and peatlands. But if the oil is developed, the credibility of this flagship plan for protecting the world’s second-largest rainforest will lie in tatters.
Senior officials in donor countries, including the United States, should call their counterparts in Congo to explain how disastrous this plan to drill for rainforest oil really is. At a minimum they should insist on commissioning and publishing an independent impact assessment of the plan before a decision to sell any oil exploration rights. This would provide the people of Congo with robust information about their resources to aid a national conversation on how the country should develop.
If the world is to cut carbon dioxide emissions to net zero by 2050 and stabilize our climate, no investments in new fossil fuels should be made anywhere. Given how vulnerable Congo is to climate impacts, it ought to be a champion of this. The oil exploration auction at the end of the month should be canceled.
Donald Trump. (photo: Erin Schaff/NYT/Redux)
The question is, what are you going to do about it? Although “radical Left Democrat” is a common dog whistle for Trump’s herd, it is an oxymoron’s oxymoron. In fact, Democrats have been wimps, trying to appease Republicans since Reagan. They must draw a line in the sand and prosecute Trump for his crimes.
The delicious irony is that Rudi Giuliani, a likely defendant if Attorney General Merrick Garland finds the gumption to prosecute, has shown the way forward. He pioneered the use of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) of 1970 to prosecute organized crime in New York. Garland should likewise pursue RICO prosecution against Donald Trump and the gang! Roger Stone and Michael Flynn too. They all enabled and prompted the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys and other political bottom feeders to operate as Trump’s paramilitary force in an attempt to overturn the 2020 Election, and keep him in office. The gallows they trotted out for Mike Pence wasn’t just for show.
RICO is appropriate precisely because Trump was engaged in organized crime. Vice Chair Liz Cheney summarized the spectrum of Trump’s crimes with his multi-pronged campaign to overturn the election with brazen efforts to: Prosecute a falsehood of fraud, pressure the vice-president to refuse to count votes, corrupt the Justice Department into doing his bidding, pressure local election officials and terrorize poll workers, and finally summon a mob to storm the Capitol. This is a reckoning for the MAGA movement, and hopefully the beginning of the end. There will always be crazy people looking for legitimization. Trump offered just that to many fringe para-military freaks on January 6. Some had been anxiously awaiting that apocalyptic day for decades. His call to arms brought them out from under rocks and caves, and empowered them to act out their dystopian anti-government fantasies they’ve been nurturing since the Bundy Ranch standoff in 2014.
Trump wrecked many lives that day including those of supporters. His imperial mindset, revealed in Mary Trump’s book, illustrates that has no sensitivity to most human lives, and only a little regard for those in servitude to him. Maybe the most unconscionable thing of all is how Trump destroyed the lives of so many great Americans citizens who were only doing their jobs. The saddest case may be the Georgia election workers, Lady Ruby Freeman and daughter Shea Moss who had their entire family terrorized by MAGA idiots, at the direction of Trump’s tweets. Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger were prisoners in their homes, because they refused to do Trump’s bidding. American carnage, indeed. That IS his legacy.
We now have insight into the presidential editorial process, if you can generously call it that. He framed his own VP for assassination, against the advice of his speech writers, and laughed about it watching the riot.
It is amazing how some of those who bought into Trump’s ideology have finally found their conscience, spine and cajones to step up and stand up before the Committee. These are some truly brave Americans, who became seduced and misguided by an ideology of selfishness and cruelty, but came to epiphany through a variety of means. Some out of conscience and decency, some out of devotion to the ethics of the legal profession, some out of devotion to the Constitution, and others out of loyalty to their concept of America. The Oath Keeper recovering members have also shown amazing courage. Cassidy Hutchinson accidentally became a witness to history, in the same honorable fashion I saw John Dean offer during Watergate. But we can’t give any credit to those like Elaine Chao, Betsy DeVos and other Cabinet secretaries who abandoned the ship only as it was going down, and have offered no form of penance.
People died in Donald Trump’s name on January 6, some as willful front-line soldiers, others defending Democracy in the most literal sense. He committed what Chairman Thompson called the “supreme dereliction of duty.” Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.) characterized the Committee’s job as to, “Fight fiction with facts, and establish full accounting for the historical record to defend our democracy.” Stone and Flynn can still hopefully go to prison because they haven’t been pardoned for crimes that occurred since their pardons by Trump. All MC’s (Members of Congress) who attended the Stop the Steal strategy meetings with Trump, and gave recon tours to the insurrectionists should be EXPELLED from Congress.
These hearings are to hold him accountable and document the full scope of the planning and conspiratorial recruiting, using Twitter as a personal megaphone. They share accountability in this. Twitter gave Trump forgiveness of code violations and undue privileges it never gave anyone else. Could it stand as a co-conspirator and enabler in a RICO trial? Now I’m having dystopian fantasies. Break up Twitter?
Trump knowingly sent an armed mob and directed it. He ignored pleas from Congress, his staff and family. Pence stepped up to some presidential duties after Trump had abandoned his, in siding with his own armed mob against the U.S. Government. Pence called the Secretary of Defense, Homeland Security, the Pentagon and Attorney General, as Trump enjoyed the mob running amok in his name. And he is so conceited and arrogant as to continue his brazen witness tampering campaign during the hearings, which further fuels the RICO concerns. The January 6 Committee is doing all the legwork, and serving it up. Can we count on AG Merrick Garland to do the right thing?
A healthcare worker and a patient. (photo: ABC News)
Galvanized by what they've characterized as an overreach of COVID-related health orders issued amid the pandemic, lawyers from the three overlapping spheres — conservative and libertarian think tanks, Republican state attorneys general, and religious liberty groups — are aggressively taking on public health mandates and the government agencies charged with protecting community health.
"I don't think these cases have ever been about public health," said Daniel Suhr, managing attorney for the Liberty Justice Center, a Chicago-based libertarian litigation group. "That's the arena where these decisions are being made, but it's the fundamental constitutional principles that underlie it that are an issue."
Through lawsuits filed around the country, or by simply wielding the threat of legal action, these loosely affiliated groups have targeted individual counties and states and, in some cases, set broader legal precedent.
In Wisconsin, a conservative legal center won a case before the state Supreme Court stripping local health departments of the power to close schools to stem the spread of disease.
In Missouri, the Republican state attorney general waged a campaign against school mask mandates. Most of the dozens of cases he filed were dismissed but nonetheless had a chilling effect on school policies.
In California, a lawsuit brought by religious groups challenging a health order that limited the size of both secular and nonsecular in-home gatherings as COVID-19 surged made it to the U.S. Supreme Court. There, the conservative majority, bolstered by three staunchly conservative justices appointed by former President Donald Trump, issued an emergency injunction finding the order violated the freedom to worship.
Other cases have chipped away at the power of federal and state authorities to mandate COVID vaccines for certain categories of employees, or thwarted a governor's ability to declare emergencies.
Although the three blocs are distinct, they share ties with the Federalist Society, a conservative legal juggernaut. They also share connections with the State Policy Network, an umbrella organization for state-based conservative and libertarian think tanks and legal centers, and the SPN-fostered American Juris Link, described by president and founder Carrie Ann Donnell as "SPN for lawyers." In the COVID era, the blocs have supported one another in numerous legal challenges by filing amicus briefs, sharing resources and occasionally teaming up.
Their legal efforts have gained traction with a federal judiciary transformed by Republican congressional leaders, who strategically stonewalled judicial appointments in the final years of Democratic President Barack Obama's second term. That put his Republican successor, Trump, in position to fill hundreds of judicial vacancies, including the three Supreme Court openings, with candidates decidedly more friendly to the small-government philosophy long espoused by conservative think tanks.
"You have civil servants up against a machine that has a singular focus and that is incredibly challenging to deal with," said Adriane Casalotti, chief of government and public affairs for the National Association of County and City Health Officials.
All told, the COVID-era litigation has altered not just the government response to this pandemic. Public health experts say it has endangered the fundamental tools that public health workers have utilized for decades to protect community health: mandatory vaccinations for public school children against devastating diseases like measles and polio, local officials' ability to issue health orders in an emergency, basic investigative tactics used to monitor the spread of infectious diseases, and the use of quarantines to stem that spread.
Just as concerning, said multiple public health experts interviewed, is how the upended legal landscape will impact the nation's emergency response in future pandemics.
"This will come back to haunt America," said Lawrence Gostin, faculty director of Georgetown University's O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. "We will rue the day where we have other public health emergencies, and we're simply unable to act decisively and rapidly."
'Legal Version' of Navy SEAL Team 6
The entities pressing the public health litigation predate the pandemic and come to the issue motivated by different dynamics. But they have found common interest following the sweeping steps public health officials took to stem the spread of a deadly and uncharted virus.
The State Policy Network affiliates have long operated behind the scenes promoting a conservative agenda in state legislatures. A KHN analysis identified at least 22 of these organizations that act in the legal arena. At least 15 have filed pandemic-related litigation, contributed amicus briefs, or sent letters threatening legal action.
Typically staffed by just a handful of lawyers, the organizations tend to focus on influencing policy at the state and county levels. At the core of their arguments is the notion that public health agencies have taken on regulatory authority that should be reserved for Congress, state legislatures and local elected bodies.
Wisconsin Institute for Law … Liberty, which calls itself the "legal version" of the Navy SEAL Team 6, has filed a flurry of COVID-related lawsuits. Among its victories is a state Supreme Court ruling that found Democratic Gov. Tony Evers' declaration of multiple states of emergency for the same event — in this case, the pandemic — was unlawful. It also used the threat of litigation to get a Midwest health care system to stop considering race as a factor in how it allocates COVID therapeutics.
The Kansas Justice Institute, whose website indicates it is staffed by one lawyer, persuaded a county-level health officer in that state to amend limitations on the size of religious gatherings and stopped a school district from issuing quarantines after sending letters laying out its legal objections.
Suhr, of the Liberty Justice Center, noted one of his group's cases underpinned the U.S. Supreme Court's decision crimping the ability of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to mandate large-business owners to require COVID vaccinations or regular testing for employees. The group teamed with the legal arm of Louisiana's Pelican Institute for Public Policy on behalf of a grocery store owner who did not want to mandate vaccines for his employees.
Republican attorneys general, meanwhile, have found in COVID-related mandates an issue that resonates viscerally with many red-state voters. Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry joined a suit against New Orleans over mask mandates, taking credit when the mandate was lifted. Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody sued the Biden administration over strict limits on cruise ships issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, arguing the CDC had no authority to issue such an order, and claimed victory after the federal government let the order expire.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton joined with the Texas Public Policy Foundation to sue the CDC over its air travel mask mandate. The case was put on hold after a Florida federal district judge in April invalidated the federal government's transportation mask mandates in a case brought by the Health Freedom Defense Fund, a group focused on "bodily autonomy." The Biden administration is fighting that ruling.
Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt has sued and sent cease and desist letters to dozens of school districts over mask mandates, and set up a tips email address where parents could report schools that imposed such mandates. The majority of his suits have been dismissed, but Schmitt has claimed victory, telling KHN "almost all of those school districts dropped their mask mandates." This year, legislators from his own political party grew so tired of Schmitt's lawsuits that they stripped $500,000 from his budget.
"Our efforts have been focused solely on preserving individual liberties and clawing power away from health bureaucrats and placing back into the hands of individuals the power to make their own choices," Schmitt, who is running for U.S. Senate, said in a written response to KHN questions. "I'm simply doing the job I was elected to do on behalf of all six million Missourians."
Numerous Republican attorneys generals teamed up and won a Supreme Court decision staying the OSHA vaccine mandate for large employers, building on the legal arguments brought by Liberty Justice Center and others. That decision was cited in the recent Supreme Court case rolling back the Environmental Protection Agency's authority to regulate the carbon emissions that cause climate change.
A 'Shared Ecosystem'
Religious liberty groups were drawn into the fray when states early in the pandemic issued broad restrictions on recreational, social and religious gatherings, sometimes limiting attendance at worship services while keeping open hardware and liquor stores. Although their legal efforts were unsuccessful in the first months of the pandemic, they gained traction after Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett, a stalwart conservative, was confirmed as a U.S. Supreme Court justice in October 2020, following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a steadfast liberal.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, rewrote an executive order after receiving a letter from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a leading religious litigation group, announcing that Catholic and Lutheran churches would be opening with or without permission. In November 2020, the Supreme Court's newly constituted majority prevented New York from enacting some COVID restrictions through a shadow court docket.
"Courts started saying, 'Show me the proof,'" said Mark Rienzi, Becket's president and CEO. "And when you start saying that 'casinos, good; churches, bad; Wall Street good; synagogue, bad,' those things at some point require some explanation."
In February 2021, Barrett joined other conservative justices in ruling against California in South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom, ending state and local bans on indoor worship services and leaving the state on the hook for $1.6 million in attorney's fees to the conservative Thomas More Society. That April, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down California and Santa Clara County rules limiting gatherings in private homes that prevented people from participating in at-home Bible study. Plaintiffs' lawyers arguing that case had clerked for Barrett and Justice Clarence Thomas.
American Juris Link, meanwhile, helped build out a list of COVID-related cases for lawyers to reference and connected lawyers working on similar cases, Donnell said.
Peter Bisbee, head of the Republican Attorneys General Association, a political fundraising machine, sits on American Juris Link's board; Donnell said the two talk regularly. Bisbee said the groups have no formal connection but share a common cause of shrinking the "expansive regulatory administrative state."
Liberty Justice Center's Suhr said litigation groups like his operate in a "shared ecosystem" to curtail government overreach. "I have not been invited to any sort of standing weekly conference call where a bunch of right-wing lawyers get on the call and talk about how they're going to bring down the public health infrastructure of America," he said. "That's not how this works."
Still, he said, everyone knows everyone else, either through previous jobs or from working on similar cases. Suhr was once policy director for former Republican Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, as well as deputy director of the student division of the Federalist Society.
'It's Not About Public Health'
No equivalent progressive state litigation network exists to defend the authority housed in government agencies, said Edward Fallone, an associate professor at Marquette University Law School and expert in constitutional law.
The difference, he said, is funding: Private donors, corporate interests, and foundations with conservative objectives have the deep pockets and motivation to build coalitions that can strategically chip away at government oversight.
On the other side, he said, is often a county attorney with limited resources.
"It's almost as if government authority is not getting defended, and it's almost a one-sided argument," he said. "It's not about public health, it's about weakening the ability of government to regulate business in general."
Public health is largely a local and state endeavor. And even before the pandemic, many health departments had lost staff amid decades of underfunding. Faced with draining pandemic workloads and legislation from conservative forces aimed at stripping agencies' powers, health officials often find it difficult to know how they can legally respond to public health threats.
And in states with conservative attorneys general, it can be even more complicated. In Missouri, a circuit court judge ruled last year that local public health officials did not have the authority to issue COVID orders, describing them as the "unfettered opinion of an unelected official."
Following the ruling, Schmitt declined the state health department's request for an appeal and sent letters to schools and health departments declaring mask mandates and quarantine orders issued on the sole authority of local health departments or schools "null and void."
"Not being able to work with the schools to quarantine students — that really inhibited our ability to do public health," said Andrew Warlen, director of Missouri's Platte County Health Department, which serves the suburbs of Kansas City. "It's one of the biggest tools we have to be able to contain disease."
The legal threats have fundamentally changed the calculus for what powers to use when, said Brian Castrucci, president and CEO of the de Beaumont Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to improving community health. "Choosing not to use a policy today may mean you can use it a year from now. But if you test the courts now, then you may lose an authority you can't get back," he said.
By no means have the blocs won all their challenges. The Supreme Court recently declined to hear a Becket lawsuit on behalf of employees challenging a vaccine mandate for health care workers in New York state that provides no exemption for religious beliefs. For now, the legal principles that for nearly 120 years have allowed governments to require vaccinations in schools and other settings with only limited exemptions remain intact.
Several lawyers associated with these conservative groups told KHN they did not think their work would have a negative effect on public health. "I honestly think the best way for them to preserve the ability to protect the public health is to do it well, and to respect people's rights while you do it," said Becket's Rienzi.
Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, a Democrat, decried the wave of litigation in what he called a "right-wing laboratory." He said he has not lost a single case where he was tasked with defending public health powers, which he believes are entirely legal and necessary to keep people alive. "You destroy government, and you destroy our emergency response powers and police powers — good luck. There will be no one to protect you."
As public health powers fade from the headlines, the groups seeking to limit government authority have strengthened bonds and gained momentum to tackle other topics, said Paul Nolette, chair of the political science department at Marquette University. "Those connections will just keep thickening over time," he said.
And the pressure against local governments shows no signs of stopping: Schmitt has set up a new online tips form similar to his efforts on masking — but for parents to report educators for teaching critical race theory.
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